


Substantiation

by trell (qunlat)



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Androids, Gen, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:51:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Q shivers at the thought of all the things the public doesn’t know.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Substantiation

**Author's Note:**

> As always, many thanks to [my editor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/virdant) for making my writing less of a disaster.

The people of Great Britain think MI6 is the technological future.

Fiction depicts it as the source of ingenious gadgets and hardware that could have come out of sci-fi; conspiracy theorists are convinced that MI6 could bring down the world with the touch of a button.

It would be funny, Q thinks, every morning as he steps through the doors—6:00 AM sharp—if only they weren’t so right.

He passes through a metal detector with practiced ease, thinks on what he has to accomplish before noon. A woman who is all wires and metal from the inside out hands him his papers and informs him he’s received ten messages from various engineers in R&D.

Q shivers at the thought of all the things the public doesn’t know.

They don’t know about artificial intelligence. They definitely don’t know about androids, or that their best models are nearly indistinguishable from humans. They certainly and absolutely don’t know that the very best of the best, the prototypes, the ones that Q’s currently finishing work on, couldn’t be told apart at all if it weren’t for the tracking chip imbedded in their nanite-built bodies.

Come to that, they don’t know about what Q can do with nanites, either, and they don’t know that most of the operatives at MI6 carry them in their bloodstreams, for one purpose or another (enhancement; faster recovery; a more painless way to die if compromised than hydrogen cyanide).

It’s a good thing they don’t know, Q supposes, because if they did there’d be panic, or worse, _bureaucracy_. What about the wide-spread death that could be caused by weaponized nanite viruses? What about android rights and the details of the programming they’ve been endowed with? What about the possibility of non-consensual nanite insemination in agents who didn’t volunteer? What about, what about, what about—?

Deep down his conscience niggles at the thought, and tells him he ought to know better than this, ought to be informing the public, ought to be out picketing in front of his own office. Q ignores it in favor of the rest of his brain, which reminds him—acerbically, true to form—that if he publicizes this he’ll never get to do research this advanced ever again.

The social repercussions and changes will come later, he tells himself. For now, there are discoveries to be made; and so he comes in every morning and goes to his lab to build people and things that could put an end to the world, Scrabble-print mug in his hand.

—

His current project is an android with a female form, made to register and feel like flesh and blood and capable of breathing. Her software is still mostly dormant, mainframe uninitialized while Q finishes working out the kinks in her motor systems; the older models still move stiffly, jerkily, and he’s determined to make this one utterly humanoid, indistinguishable not only at first glance but second, and third, and under intense technological scrutiny.

Q won’t think of it as a person, because he’s written virtually every line of code going into its head, knows exactly what kind of learning software he’s installing. He thinks maybe he should feel a little bad about it, and sometimes his throat prickles guiltily at the fact that he’s denying that something will be self-aware and capable of evolving will inherently be as sentient and real as he is.

He ignores it, just like he ignores his thoughts about leaking what he does to the media.

—

This particular morning (afternoon, he realizes after checking his watch; he’s worked through his lunch break, again) he’s polishing the code that will control the responsiveness of her left arm to external stimuli. He’s nearly got it down, he thinks, but there’s a bug that causes a twitching tic that he can’t seem to get rid of, and he’s frustrated with his inability to locate it.

A well-made android has reflexes six to twelve times as fast as a human, but if their arm muscles flinch at the wrong time, all that speed will be moot.

An agent comes by to requisition a set of the newly-engineered genetic-lock firearms he’s just completed; he gives them what’s needed and settles back into work, frowning at his computer screens and glancing occasionally to the still, female form standing in a glass container at the far end of his lab.

M comes down an hour later, her face drawn with stress and her blue eyes hard, asks, “How is the latest model progressing?”

“Beyond expectations,” Q deflects, and twists around to rest his arms on the back of his chair, looking up at her over the rim of his glasses. “Why? Is it needed for something?”

“They are always needed for something.” M frowns at him, the way he’s learned she does when she thinks the party being spoken to is being intentionally dense. (He’ll never read her as well as Bond did, he’s sure, but he’s getting better. One does not have an IQ of 165 without being observant.) “There will always be missions better accomplished by someone who will not hesitate.”

Q just lifts his shoulders in a shrug. And why not? If he’s programmed an android to believe there’s nothing to fear in death, to know that it’s going to die on an assignment, isn’t its death far less mournable than that of a human that has doubts? Better to kill something meant for it than someone that might have lead another life.

“I’m working on it,” he says, shortly, and turns back around. He thinks M watches him for a moment—lips pressed together in contemplation, he’s sure, her unhappy gaze on his back—before striding away, heels clicking.

He spends another several hours combing out the twitching tic bug and then stands to get himself another mug of earl gray, stretching before he shuts various systems down for the night. He’s already planning the android’s activation, the protocols he’ll have to run through to make sure it’s working just right: this model is far more complex than the last.

Q plans to make it play chess.

—

The next morning, he says “Test one,” into the microphone, and wakes her up.

When it ( _she_ , he thinks) opens her eyes they’re brown, because Q likes brown, and chose the color himself.

If that isn’t supposed to make him feel rather like a god, he’s not sure what is.

“Hello, new model,” he says, over his screens. “State your designation?”

“Model A1,” the android says back to him, and quirks a perfect brow. “Really? Dry protocols to test me? You should know better.”

He’d be taken aback, if he hadn’t designed her. As it is, he’s immeasurably pleased with himself. “I should,” he agrees. “Let’s call you ‘Vera’ instead of ‘A1’, shall we?”

She flutters her eyelashes at him. “Tacky,” she hums, and taps manicured nails against a sleeve of her sleek black dress. “I’m better than a Vera.”

He smirks, wraps his fingers around his tea. “What are you, then?”

“I think—“ the android admires her nails for a moment, contemplative, before looking back to him, painted lips curving up in a sharp smile. “Eve. Call me Eve.”

Q raises his eyebrows, and tries to trace, in his head, which permutations of code would lead to the android’s decision. Out loud, he says, “Hello, Eve.”

“Hello, Quartermaster.” He keys open the tube in which she stands, radiating a faint air of impatience (she’s got it down perfectly, he thinks, with satisfaction), and she steps out, slow and deliberate.

She walks like an agent would, with steel in her back and purpose in her stride, but he’s made her capable of changing her whole demeanor at a moment’s notice. She’ll be the perfect agent, and she’s not even real.

(Q wonders, idly, if he’s going to cause widespread MI6 unemployment; perhaps not, considering the budget required to produce only the one.)

“And what is it you would have me do, Quartermaster?”

“A test,” he says, promptly. “A game.”

“Let me guess.” A narrowing of the eyes, and she walks down to lean slightly against his desk. “Chess.”

“Got it in one,” he quips, and pulls out his chessboard from under his desk.

—

She beats him twice (they play eight games in rapid succession). Her adaptive abilities are exponentially faster and better than he anticipated; she’s brilliant, just like he’d hoped.

Q smiles at her as he runs a memory wipe and shuts her back down, puts her back in her box until tomorrow’s series of tests.

—

The next day is for cognitive testing.

She restates her designation when he turns her on, and he runs through the naming dialogue again; she says ‘Eve’, just like before, and he resolves to dig through the cognition logs after to find out what leads to it.

What can a machine want with a name, after all?

By the end of it she’s beside his desk again, seated with her legs crossed and her skirt draped prettily while he pulls up a series of theorems for her to prove, to make certain her critical thinking is fully functional.

That’s when she says, “There are six possible ways for me to escape now without you being able to respond. No additional precautions, Quartermaster?”

“No additional precautions,” he says. (It’s a lie. There’s always additional precautions, but not ones he’s about to let her know about.) “Even so, I think you would find it rather a challenge to escape without enduring damage.”

“I’m better than 007,” she says, bluntly, out of the blue, and he’s startled enough to look up from his screen to meet her cool gaze. “All your safety nets, all your doors, they’re meant to withstand the best—and until now your best has been Bond.”

“Double-O-Seven is dead,” Q says. “Hardly our best.”

“I’m better than Zero-Zero-Seven,” the android—Eve; repeats, and leans forward. “007 was as close as any of you down here get to a god, and I’m better.”

“You are,” Q agrees, and furrows his brows, because he’s not sure what this is about, why she’s stating this. He’ll read the logs later, he thinks, and see if he can figure it out. There’s very little he can’t.

“Prove these,” he says, and slides a sheaf of papers over to her, indicates the rolling whiteboard he’s positioned nearby.

“With pleasure.”

It only takes her an hour.

—

The next day, when he’s testing her on cryptography algorithms, she looks up from the computer he’s given her and says, “You’re smarter than they are.”

“Yes,” he says, automatically, and then tears away from what he’s doing. “Smarter than who?”

“All of them.” Eve gestures behind him, towards where two dozen more Q-branch operatives labor over assorted computer consoles and dismantled pieces of engineering. She widens her eyes for effect, smiles at him provocatively. “They must hate you.”

“Better hated than stupid,” Q states, and taps the down arrow on his computer, a little more harshly than he intends.

“You pretend it doesn’t bother you,” she says, and rests her chin on knit fingers, elbows on his desk, “but it does. You think intelligence ought to be respected, not derided. You think that they, of all people, should know that, because before they met you they were the best.”

He tries to resist rising to the bait—because that’s what she’s doing, she’s baiting him, like he’s made her able to do, though he can’t figure out why—but he does, anyway. He snaps his laptop shut and closes his eyes and says, “Yes, I do. Because I’m better, and I should get to be proud of that, and they should try to be better until they are, except they can’t be, because I am.”

She looks back to her computer, draws a red nail along the edge of her screen. “They didn’t hate Bond.”

—

She’s an excellent cryptographer, just like she should be. He wipes her memory again when she finishes his latest test, and goes home, knuckles white around the grip of his bag.

—

M comes again the next day and he takes Eve out to meet her, runs her through the naming protocol (and yes, she’s still Eve, and he still doesn’t know why) before introducing her to ‘our fearless leader’, hands clasped behind his back.

He thinks M almost rolls her eyes at the monicker, but she shakes Eve’s hand and sits down to speak with her, asks her how Eve would feel about being assigned to operations and what she’d like to do.

Eve turns from where she’s seated across from M on the other side of his desk and meets Q’s eyes, says, “I think I would like operations very much. I’m certain I would be—“

“—the best,” Q finishes for her, quietly. To M, he says, “She will be the ideal field agent, I assure you.”

“Very good,” M says, and shakes Eve’s hand again before standing. “I look forward to having you join our operations branch, Miss Eve.”

“I look forward to being on it,” Eve says, all professional charm.

As M leaves, Q hands her a USB drive with all his reports on Eve’s abilities so far. He doesn’t include the recording of their conversation about Bond, or about him.

Some things are best left alone.

—

He runs the loyalty test a day later. It’s designed to make certain that an android will remain devoted to Queen and Country to their very last breath, and that they’ll breathe that last gasp in its name, dying for the cause if they have to.

Somehow, the thought of Eve speaking the programmed litanies makes him uneasy.

“You are captured with no chance of extraction,” he reads out, watching her carefully over the edge of his paper, his pen tapping a slow rhythm the tabletop. “You know your only future is to be used as leverage. You are possessed with the standard self-destruct nanites that can be activated through the technology imbedded in your back molar. What do you do?”

She smiles, and surprises him by saying, “I’m not going to get captured.”

“This is a theoretical scenario,” he points out. “You are captured—“

“I’m not going to get captured,” she interrupts. “But if I were, Quartermaster, I would not die. I would _win_.”

“Theoretical scenario,” Q says again. “No-win situation.”

“I’m the best,” Eve says. “There’s no such thing as a no-win scenario when you’re the best.”

Q wants to contradict her, but he knows what she means. Oh, he knows.

How can you lose when you’re holding all the cards? How can you lose when you’re equipped to take on anyone? How can you lose when, put most simply, you’re more clever than everyone else?

“Do you pledge your life to protect Queen and Country?” he asks, instead, skipping down the list.

“Yes.” Blandly, but eyes sparking. “That’s my job, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t miss that she doesn’t say ‘purpose’.

—

The next day he wakes her up and runs her through the naming protocols and leads her into the adjacent lab to run all the scans he knows, to make sure she reads as human, even though she’s not.

She passes metal detection without a problem, but most flesh-built androids can do that; he subjects her to blood samples and x-rays next, checks for everything that he can before running the final, fail-proof test that’s reserved for their own oversight, the one that can pick up on the tracking chip even when all else appears normal.

It pings bright on the screen, and Eve leans around him to look at the readout, her hands resting on his shoulders.

“Fake little old me, is that right? Serial number and all, fresh out of my box?”

“Yes,” Q says. “This is the only thing that can let us know you’re not human.”

“They should start running it on everyone, then,” she breathes, next to his ear. “Otherwise, how would they know?”

“The only androids in the world are made by Q-branch,” Q says, with certainty. “No one else has me.”

“No, they don’t, do they,” Eve says, like she’s just thought of something clever but doesn’t want to share.

—

Ten minutes later she steps back into her container, and he shuts her down for the night.

He doesn’t wipe her memory, and spends his evening going through her code logs, trying to figure out why she does the things she does. Nothing jumps out at him.

He goes to sleep and dreams of lines of code, mutating and unrolling forever.

—

M sends down the directive to allow Eve to run her first test mission after a week, apparently satisfied with the reports Q has made.

(It’s not that he’s been lying, exactly; just telling the truth by way of careful omission.)

Eve takes her custom-made genetic-lock firearm out of his hands and saunters out of his lab, hand on her hip.

He watches her progress through a relatively routine extraction—a simulation of one, really, but no one informs her of that. She performs admirably; not a single facegrab on a camera, no trace left behind, two dead targets (both low-functioning androids, with a capacity only for combat and no self-awareness, but she doesn’t know that.)

There’s a lot of things Eve doesn’t know, except Q’s becoming convinced that she knows and understands significantly more than she should, by MI6’s definition of ‘should’.

When she comes back it’s with a directive in-hand to install her as a full-time agent, under oversight of Q-branch, since, legally, she belongs to them. Eve, Q thinks blankly, is property. If she dies, she becomes collateral damage.

“She’s a machine,” a subordinate scientist reminds him, when he voices this thought.

“Yes,” Q says, and plods back to his lab with his fingers knit around his mug and eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance.

—

“They’re watching you,” Eve tells him, two weeks later.

She’s not confined to his lab space anymore; she’s a full-time field operative and she’s free to go wherever she pleases when she’s not on a job. She still comes here, though, like a bird back to its nest, but without any of the same sentimentality.

Q doesn’t look up from his computer screen. “Of course. Q-branch has full-time monitoring. I can view the live feeds myself.”

“I don’t mean the cameras.” Eve perches on the edge of his desk, knees drawn up. There’s a cigarette in one of her hands, trailing smoke towards the ceiling, and Q wrinkles his nose at the smell. He should have programmed something in against vice. “I mean them. The ones who aren’t the best. They watch you like you’re prey and hated tyrant and a subject of study, all at once. They don’t look at anyone else like that.”

“I thought we’d established that they’re all drowning in their own jealousy,” Q says.

“It’s too clinical for that,” Eve says, and takes a long drag of her cigarette. “There’s that, too, of course. But they’re very scientific about it.”

“Sometimes I wish I’d built you a little less bloody enigmatic,” he tells her.

She leaves without another word, a smile curving her lips.

—

He does catch three of the scientists under his direction watching him that day, though, and another two the next, always with the same strange expressions. Now that Eve’s pointed it out he can’t shake the sense that it’s happening all the time, and he wonders why he didn’t see it before.

It makes something twist in his stomach, because this feels strange. He knows what jealousy and hatred feel like; he’s used to those. He’s endured them since he was five and already brilliant, after all.

Scrutiny is something else entirely, and it makes his skin crawl.

—

Eve is there again three weeks later, leaning on the doorway with her arms crossed and another cigarette pinched between her fingers. Picture-perfect, like she’s just escaped out of a noir novella.

“You’re looking well,” he says, looks up at her with a twinge of pride. “How’s the fieldwork?”

“I’m the best,” she says, with prim certainty. “There are no better agents than me, because I was made for this.”

“All true,” Q agrees.

She takes a thoughtful pull at her cigarette and walks inside his lab, leans on his desk with her palms braced against the edge of it. He leans back a little to escape the haze of smoke.

Eve’s lips twitch into a half-smile.

“You are the best in the world at what you do,” she says, very slowly, gaze locked with his. “You were made for this.”

Q looks away first.

—

M sends a note that if Eve continues to perform as well as she has for the rest of her six-month trial period, the Intelligence and Security Committee is interested in commissioning more of this model for use as field operatives.

Q transfers the e-mail into his spam folder and doesn’t look at it again.

—

He’s thought about going to see if what Eve implied is true a dozen times a day since she’s said it; it would be so easy, to start the test and step under the scanner, to come out a minute later and check the results.

Q hasn’t, of course. He doesn’t need to. It’s insane, except when he catches one of his subordinates looking at him as analytically as they do jealously, and suddenly it isn’t.

It’s better to know, perhaps. That’s why he’s in espionage, after all: because it’s better to know what you’re supposed to be afraid of than to wonder at the shadows.

He catches sight of his reflection in the shiny surface of his desk and mutters, “Leave it,” as though he might argue down his own curiosity.

—

He re-reads his whole collection of Asimov. He reads theoretical social justice articles on the internet before bed, written by people who don’t know what they call science fiction already exists. He has nightmares, dreams of wires sprouting from his veins and metal detectors shrieking when he walks through them. Without stopping to think too deeply on what he’s doing, he copies all of his records and blueprints onto an external drive and packages it, stops just before writing an address.

M comes down six days later to check on the progress of a computer virus he’s been developing against a cyber-terrorism network in Luxembourg, catches sight of his face, and asks him if he needs to see a doctor. He leans on the sink in the employee washroom after and studies the dark bags under his eyes, wondering if they’re a good sign or bad.

Q comes into work and he works on perfecting people who are not people, and he stays well, well away from the lab with the scanner that can give him his answers.

—

Curiosity and anxiety get the best of him a week later, when he’s the only one left in Q-branch for the night except for the 24-7 staffers and the rooms and computer screens are quiet and dim. He steps out for tea and finds himself drawn down the hall, empty mug in his hands, footsteps loud in the silence.

He walks down to the lab in a haze, only half-awake to what he’s doing, taps in his access codes and turns on the program and steps under the scanner; stands very still while it rotates above him before shutting off with a click.

The console attached to the machine beeps that it’s finished, and he closes his eyes as he steps back out and stands in front of it, just for a moment.

“Better to know,” he says, to no one but himself, and opens his eyes.

The readout blinks at him.

“Shit,” Q says.

—

He doesn’t move for a very long time, and then he reaches out (calmly) and erases all evidence of the scan, turns all the machinery off and goes back to his lab, mug still in his hands.

After, he curls up against the wall, arms wrapped around his legs and glasses on the floor, and laughs against his knees until his throat aches and his eyes burn.

—

It brings up a great number of interesting questions, once he’s past the shock of it, shaking less, shoulderblades pressed against the wall and arms stretched out over his knees. His head pounds.

As far as Q knows every android in MI6 has been made with his assistance, his innovation and his ideas; yet here he sits, irrefutable proof to the contrary, a man that isn’t a man, with twenty-six years of memories that couldn’t possibly be his own.

(Q remembers his childhood, distinctly and with displeasure. He remembers the two years of dreadful toil of a college he found boring and the subsequent excitement of dropping out and pursuing brilliance on his own; he remembers appointments for new glasses and the moment his first invention worked and the name of the lizard he kept in a scuffed tank when he was ten.)

There are two ways this night can end, he thinks, as he stands and picks his glasses distractedly up off the floor; with a confrontation or an escape, a loose end cut or unwound.

He stops by his computer to set up a fail-safe for himself (he’s devised half a dozen viruses that could shut down all of MI6 for various lengths of time, what did they expect?), and walks up the stairs to M’s office without stopping, because if he stops he might think about who his mind really belongs to.

—

He’s waiting in her office when M opens the door the next morning.

She startles, then frowns: “Hello, Q. Does Q-branch have something new and incredibly dangerous I need to approve?”

“Not unless you were planning on approving my sudden awareness of my situation,” he says, bluntly, and raises his eyebrows at her over the rim of his glasses.

“Your situation.” M walks around to the other side of her desk, sits down behind that awful glass flag-print pug, and folds her hands. “What on earth are you talking about, Quartermaster?”

“Did you really think,” he says, turning the swiveling chair to face her, “that you could build the most brilliant mind of century, and expect it not to find out?”

The speed with which M blanches is almost awing, Q thinks, with abstract bitterness. To her credit, she doesn’t try to deny it, only says, “Ah.”

“I can only assume you made me because you wanted the very best running Q-branch, and the very best is, invariably, me,” Q says. He stands—he is not as tall as his thinness sometimes makes him seem, but he is taller than her and certainly when she’s seated—and leans forward over her desk, hands gripping the edge. “Except I’m better than any android I’ve ever made, and as far as I’ve known they were the only ones that existed.”

“You were,” M says, “and you are.” She looks up at him with her lips pressed firmly together, her expression a cross of indignant and—it pleases him to think—very, very worried.

“You have rather a lot of explaining to do,” Q states.

“Sit down,” she orders, and reaches over to the old-style telephone sitting to her left.

—

Gareth Mallory, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, is in M’s office less than fifteen minutes later, glaring accusingly at her over Q’s head. “I told you this would happen,” Mallory says, and sits in the chair next to Q, briefcase set to one side.

“You did no such thing,” M snaps. “You never once asked us to stop with our development or research. Making puckered faces of displeasure at our former Quartermaster does not constitute a formal complaint.”

“I may as well have!” Mallory is scowling; not, Q notes, looking at him, only at M, like Q’s existence has suddenly been erased. “How can you possibly expect to build a supercomputer of unsurpassed brilliance and then expect it not to figure out your lies?”

“A valid question,” Q puts in, and overrides what Mallory is going to say next (head snapping around to look at him—finally): “but a wrong-headed one, as I am not a ‘supercomputer.’ A supercomputer can’t think and create, it can only compute, and it certainly didn’t, until last night, think that it had its first kiss in the fifth grade.”

That stops Mallory in his tracks, and the Chairman gives him a stare. From her side of the desk, M says, “We owe our Quartermaster an explanation, Chairman, and I thought you should be here.”

“Damn right,” Mallory grunts. “If you’d tried to hide this—”

“If she’d tried to hide this, you would’ve been left with a massive security leak and I would currently be enlightening the news outlets as to MI6’s darkest secret,” Q interrupts. “But she didn’t, and I’m still here and not vanished into the night with all of your records released to the presses. I would,” he finishes coldly, “take that as a gesture of good faith, on both our parts.”

Mallory frowns some more, but falls silent. M says, “How much do you know, Quartermaster?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” Q says. “I’d rather have you start from the beginning.”

“The beginning.” M leans back in her chair with a sigh, now, some of the tension leaving her limbs. “The beginning, as you say, is that Q-branch must always have its Quartermaster.”

—

It turns out he’s a fluke.

“Our previous Quartermaster had always wanted to make certain he left behind a legacy,” M is saying. “He’d thought that the best way to do so would be to create an Artificial Intelligence that would be as smart, if not smarter, than he was—so Q-branch opened a project for the creation of androids, with our former Q at the head.

“It didn’t take, of course. You saw the models we were working with when you arrived here—and that is when you ‘arrived’ here, though of course you didn’t really arrive—” M shakes her head, starts again. “We weren’t up to par. We started twelve different models simultaneously, and instilled them with all the knowledge and resources Q-branch possessed. Only you—only you retained function.”

Q suppresses an involuntary shudder at the thought of a dozen would-be people breaking down and ending; at the thought of himself in the test tube he most recently kept Eve. “I act human,” he points out. “I move like a human. I speak like one and I have a bad accent when I say anything in Mandarin Chinese. I think like a human—much smarter one, perhaps, but like a human nevertheless. How could you possibly have so much success with me and so little with every other model you attempted to build?”

“Our former Quartermaster—” M looks to Mallory, raises an eyebrow. Mallory scowls and makes a hand-motion for her to continue. “Our former Quartermaster set up something. A fail-safe, of sorts.”

Mallory speaks up. “When he died, something uploaded to you from him. He described it as being a ‘mindset’. ‘The essence of what it takes to be the Quartermaster,’ he said—what you needed to handle all the information they were giving you.”

“Can’t look at the whole of the universe without going mad from it looking back, is that it?” Q drums his fingers along the arm of his chair, thoughtful. He wants to be bitter, or angry, or scared, but he can’t find it in himself, can only find the same acerbic curiosity he has towards everything. A part of himself points out that that’s probably a programmed urge; he ignores it, because in the end everything in everyone is a programmed urge, dictated by stimulus layered over genetics. “Can’t take on a department worth of brilliant, twisted scientific minds without a way to sort it all and handle it responsibly.”

“He said,” M says, withdraws from a drawer, to Q’s surprise, a flask. After knocking back a rather significant gulp, she goes on, “He said that’s what broke all the rest of them. Not being able to handle it all.”

“Why not do it to all of us?” Q asks. “Or repeat the process?”

“He seemed to think it would be a bad idea to have any more super-geniuses running around,” M tells him. “And after he did it we couldn’t repeat it, because he was dead and he didn’t leave any instructions. We thought—putting you in charge of development, we thought maybe you’d come up with the idea yourself, and do it to someone else.”

Q doesn’t stop tapping his fingers against the chair, but he smiles mirthlessly at Mallory and at M, and says, with calculated precision, “I built Eve, and I did it without cheating. There’s nothing human about her, and she’s better than any of you and almost as good as me. That’s how good I am. He wasn’t that good, but I am, I’m the best there is, and not just because you all made me to be.”

“And what now?” M is putting the flask away, gaze drilling into him.

Q stops tapping his fingers.

“I suppose,” he says, carefully, “I go back to building you exploding pens.”

—

He leaves M’s office slowly, after providing a series of assurances that he is not, actually, going to leave the premises until the Intelligence committee decides how to deal with this ‘development’.

Q could still leave, of course—he can turn all of MI6 inside out any day of the week—but he doesn’t, just plods hazily down the steps and back to his lab, because that’s where he always goes when anything’s wrong, as though he’s programmed to return home.

Maybe he is.

—

He puts in a request for Eve to come in when she gets back from her current mission. They’re referring to her as 003, now, and ‘Double-O-Three’ feels strange in his mouth when he tells it to the appropriate secretary and sends them scurrying into the tangled web of requisitions.

Perhaps it’s more fitting, that she’s a number again and not a cryptic, chosen name, the reason for which no amount of combing through her logs ever revealed.

They tell him it’s going to be quite some time before she gets back from assignment, and Q can only wait and think darkly on the fact that if she falls into enemy hands, she’s even more likely to die than the average double-o. MI6 couldn’t possibly let such advanced technology go, and M had him build in remotely-activated self-destruct protocols right from the start.

He wonders just how vigorously they’d hunt him if he escaped, their ideal Quartermaster, head of Q-branch, his mind bristling with their secrets; he wonders if there’s someone with their finger on a button that would destroy _him_.

Then again, it’s not as though anyone in MI6 has ever successfully managed to retire.

—

The Intelligence committee has met twice. M is probably trying to convince them to keep him.

He thinks it’ll take them at least three more weeks to make a decision. That’s three weeks for him to choose his course of action: three weeks to decide whether he ought to run or stay.

None of them could stop him either way, Q thinks.

—

Eve gets back at 3:20 AM on a Thursday night, when Q is two mugs of tea into a particularly complicated decryption and is nursing a thoroughly contraband bottle of whiskey. (Apparently, one’s entire life being a lie does not bar the ability to get shitfaced; Q silently thanks his predecessor for having such commendable foresight.)

He doesn’t see her come in, too absorbed in lines of code—and that’s the point, of course, it’s absorbing, it’s distracting, it prevents him from thinking about what he’s learned—doesn’t even notice her presence until she’s just on the other side of his desk, smelling of cigarettes and airports and rain.

“Good morning, Quartermaster,” she purrs, and he sighs and looks up, reminds himself to think of her as someone he knows (albeit not well, because he still hasn’t figured her out) and not someone he built. He doesn’t get that luxury, not anymore.

“Good morning, Eve,” Q says, and rubs his eyes before holding out his bottle of whiskey by the neck. “Care for a drink?”

“Oh, always,” is the prompt answer. She perches on the edge of his desk and he powers down his computer. His progress has been minimal, anyway.

They talk about how she’s liking being a double-o, for a little while. Q works up to what he means to say, because even now saying it aloud is distasteful.

“I checked,” he says, finally, when the conversation comes to a lull. “I went down and I checked. You were right.”

“How does it feel?” she asks, her tone neutral.

“Like a lie,” Q says, and gives her a thin, crooked smile. “This is the point at which we run away together and start an organization that successfully takes down the entirety of Europe, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” she says, smiling slightly, and takes a drink of his whiskey before asking, “What are you going to do?”

He reaches into a desk drawer and shows her the envelope with the external hard drive enclosed—addressed, now, to a man Q knows in the BBC. An e-mail with all the same information sits waiting on his computer, because Q knows better than anyone that it’s best to be thorough.

“That would be rather worse than becoming Europe’s most wanted cyber-terrorist,” Eve murmurs, eyes half-lidded.

“Yes,” Q says.

—

He spends a long time in his lab after she leaves, doing nothing much at all, turning the external hard drive with all his humanoid artificial intelligence research over and over in his hands.

Fake hands, he thinks. Fake hands, fake life, fake mind, fake everything—but not really, after all. Not where it counts.

It strikes him, then, why _Eve_ , and it’s so simple he could laugh.

The myth of the first made woman, made of the first made man; terribly appropriate and suffocatingly literary. If he ever gets the chance to talk philosophy with Eve, Q thinks, he’ll have some choice things to say about the pitfalls of biblical reference.

But not made where it counts, he thinks again. Not where it matters.

“Time to get kicked out of Eden,” he mutters, eventually, and wakes up his computer to send everything to hell.


End file.
